Why OpenPGP is not wanted - stupid is in vogue right now

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 6/10/2013 11:37 PM, Jean-David Beyer wrote:
> Of course he did not seriously propose the idea as a real course of 
> action. But it is interesting to think about.

I drive a Mustang GT with enough engine work to make it genuinely
dangerous to unprepared drivers.  When I was taking a couple of advanced
driving classes (because I don't want to be a hazard on the road behind
such a vehicle), one of my instructors -- a police driving instructor --
told me about a collision he recently saw with a tricked-out Mustang GT
like mine.

17-year-old drives an econobox to high school.  One day he gets to
borrow somebody else's tricked-out Mustang GT, and in order to impress
his friends with the noise of the engine, briefly floors the pedal.
He's expecting the engine to make a howling noise but of course he'll
take his foot off the pedal before the car goes out of control.

Except the car doesn't make a howling noise.  It howls *and lunges*, and
the G-forces were something this young man had never before experienced.
 The new experience left him cognitively paralyzed for a good part of a
second... with his foot still on the gas pedal.  At the last moment he
snapped out of it.  He thought he didn't have enough room to
successfully brake, so instead he whipped the wheel around --

-- and discovered that due to the car's lunging acceleration, virtually
all of the weight was on the rear wheels.  The front wheels didn't have
enough weight on them to allow them to keep traction with the road.  The
car didn't veer.  His response was to turn the wheel harder, not
recognizing that *his foot was still on the accelerator*.  His cognitive
process was something like, "braking is pointless right now so I'm not
going to move my foot I'll just worry about steering out of it."

Whoops.

He crashed into another parked car at about 45.  Wasn't wearing a
seatbelt, but the airbags deployed and saved his life.  He got to walk
away from the collision after doing over $10,000 of damage to the
vehicles involved.

Although an anecdote is not the same thing as hard data and NTSB crash
statistics, I respectfully suggest there's a third option Fitch was
overlooking:

	3.  A lot of people are just going to kill themselves by
	    doing stupid things they think can't possibly hurt
	    them.